Gift

It's hard to believe that, after all these years, I still have it.   A white two pocket portfolio proclaiming, "Welcome to the World of Strawberry Shortcake" and "Have a strawberry day!" 

There's  a piece of yellowed tape still clinging to the top middle with "STORIES" written in green magic marker, in all capital letters.   In the upper right hand corner, where all American children who pay attention in school know to put their names, is my maiden name.

I open the portfolio, or folder as any kid would call it.  On the left side, a much younger Jennifer had written the title "Plays and Other Stories."  On the right side, "Mysteries."   I am greeted by pages and pages of notebook paper, some stapled and some loose, filled with handwriting that is both familiar and unfamiliar to me.  Ink and pencil.   Cursive and manuscript.  Some of it is chicken scratch.  Did I really once make a cursive J like that?

There is a compilation of stories and poems stapled together, complete with a table of contents and a glossary.  These are from second grade.  I can't resist checking the glossary.  I see that the word "all" is defined as:  "Got every one of something." 

There are seven other short stories on the left side, as well as a copy of a play I remember writing while at a friend's house.   Scene 1.  Melanie walks in singing "Merry Christmas."   I remember three of us working together to write the script, practicing our lines, and performing our play for our parents who had just finished a game of Rummy.  I can still smell the Doritos we used to eat during those playdates, which were not called playdates then.  It was just what we did.

On the right side, there are more stories.  These are from fourth and fifth grades.  I remember some of them: "Nothing Means Something," "Nancy and the Mistaken Slippers," and "The Case of the Missing Keys."  I see a very long story, "Goodbye Forever," with a teacher's handwritten note on the first page:  "Be sure to send me an autographed copy of your first novel." 

There is another play, which I remember co-writing with one of my closest childhood friends Julie.  My lines in the play are highlighted in yellow.  The pages are wrinkled, probably from me carrying them around while we practiced.  This play is longer, so we probably worked on it over many sleepovers in between playing Barbies and solving mysteries in the backyard.

There is a booklet with a very nice cover on which I had written in calligraphy,  "All About My Dad."  It is dated Father's Day, age 8, 1983.
 

These pages are not just stories some kid wrote in the 1980s.  These are pages from my childhood.  They are penned by my hands before I knew how to type, before I worried about what others would think, before I wore lipstick.  They allow me to see and hold what I was thinking, feeling, and observing so many years ago.  What a gift to have given my grown-up self!